Aligned Poly-l-lactic Acid Nanofibers Induce Self-Assembly of Primary Cortical Neurons into 3D Cell Clusters.

Relative to two-dimensional (2D) culture, three-dimensional (3D) culture of primary neurons has yielded increasingly physiological responses from cells. Electrospun nanofiber scaffolds are frequently used as a 3D biomaterial support for primary neurons in neural tissue engineering, while hydrophobic surfaces typically induce aggregation of cells. Poly-l-lactic acid (PLLA) was electrospun as aligned PLLA nanofiber scaffolds to generate a structure with both qualities. Primary cortical neurons from E18 Sprague-Dawley rats cultured on aligned PLLA nanofibers generated 3D clusters of cells that extended highly aligned, fasciculated neurite bundles within 10 days. These clusters were viable for 28 days and responsive to AMPA and GABA. Relative to the 2D culture, the 3D cultures exhibited a more developed profile; mass spectrometry demonstrated an upregulation of proteins involved in cortical lamination, polarization, and axon fasciculation and a downregulation of immature neuronal markers. The use of artificial neural network inference suggests that the increased formation of synapses may drive the increase in development that is observed for the 3D cell clusters. This research suggests that aligned PLLA nanofibers may be highly useful for generating advanced 3D cell cultures for high-throughput systems.

Service users as the key to service change? The development of an innovative intervention for excluded young people.

BACKGROUND: Excluded young people, especially those affected by street gangs, often have complex unmet needs and high levels of health and social inequalities. This paper outlines the development of Music & Change, an innovative and comprehensive intervention accessible to young people, which aimed to holistically meet the mental health and other needs of its participants and ultimately to reduce offending rates. Its central principle was coproduction and partnership with its potential users. METHOD: The setting was an inner-city housing estate; the core group of participants was 15 young people aged 16-22 years. The intervention used contemporary music skills (e.g. DJ-ing and lyric writing) and other coproduced project activities as a vehicle to build relationships with practitioners and address young people's multiple needs. Data were gathered using a focused ethnography, largely from field notes, and analysed using thematic analysis in order to ascertain users' perceptions of its delivery. RESULTS: Young people identified six key principles of the intervention, such as the need for consistent relationships with trusted staff, mental health support to be wrapped round other youth-led activities and local service delivery within their safe territories. CONCLUSIONS: Music & Change was valued by young people who do not easily engage with professionals and services. The findings led to the development of the 'Integrate' model, which is using these coproduced principles to underpin several new pilot projects that aim to address the health and social inequalities of excluded young people.

Metamemory in temporal lobe epilepsy: a study of sensitivity to repetition at encoding.

The purpose of the current study was to determine whether the level of metacognitive sensitivity previously observed in global Judgments-of-Learning (JOLs) in temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) patients could also be established when making item-by-item JOLs. Fourteen TLE patients and 14 control participants were compared on a memory task where 39 semantically unrelated word pairs were presented at three different levels of repetition. Thirteen word pairs were assigned to each level. A combined JOL and Feeling-of-Knowing (FOK) task was used to examine metamemory monitoring and control processes. The results showed that control participants outperformed TLE patients on recall and recognition. However, both groups were sensitive to repetition of the word pairs throughout the list, revealing intact online monitoring and control processes at encoding. These results are consistent with the findings of Howard et al. (2010) of intact metamemory in TLE patients and extend the findings of Andrés et al. (2010) of metamemory sensitivity from the global level to the item-by-item level. Finally, the current findings provide additional evidence of a dissociation between memory and metamemory in TLE patients.

Part set cuing in older adults: further evidence of intact forgetting in aging.

The aim of this study was to look at the effect of aging on part set cuing while equating for baseline performance in episodic memory. Younger and older participants listened to three different word lists, each containing 24 words relating to a particular category. During recall, 0, 33, or 66% of the items presented in the learning phase were re-presented as cues. The results showed that recall of the never cued items was equally impaired by the presence of cues in younger and older adults, thus showing equivalent part set cuing effects in both groups. These results parallel previous findings showing equivalent inhibitory effects in younger and older adults with tasks that do not require executive control and provide additional support to previous studies challenging the view that frontal/executive processes play a major role in part set cuing.

Preserved monitoring and control processes in temporal lobe epilepsy.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to assess an aspect of metamemory never examined before in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE): the ability to upgrade the accuracy of one's memory predictions after study. METHOD: Four lists of different levels of difficulty and relatedness were presented to 15 TLE patients and 15 control participants, who were asked to predict their subsequent recall both before and after studying each list. RESULTS: The results showed clear impairment in recall in TLE patients. However, both TLE patients and controls showed an improvement in accuracy in their poststudy predictions compared with their prestudy predictions, showing that both groups were able to upgrade their metamemory predictions. Unexpectedly, prediction accuracy was overall higher in TLE patients than in controls. Moreover, study time was allocated in both groups taking into account the characteristics of the list. CONCLUSION: These results confirm and extend findings of Howard et al. (2010) of intact metamemory in TLE patients, and provide further support to the dissociation between memory and metamemory in this clinical population.

Memory, metamemory and their dissociation in temporal lobe epilepsy.

Patients with temporal-lobe epilepsy (TLE) present with memory difficulties. The aim of the current study was to determine to what extent these difficulties could be related to a metamemory impairment. Fifteen patients with TLE and 15 matched healthy controls carried out a paired-associates learning task. Memory recall was measured at intervals of 30min and 4 weeks. We employed a combined Judgement-of-Learning (JOL) and Feeling-of-Knowing (FOK) task to investigate whether participants could monitor their memory successfully at both the item-by-item level and the global level. The results revealed a clear deficit of episodic memory in patients with epilepsy compared with controls, but metamemory in TLE patients was intact. Patients were able to monitor their memory successfully at the item-by-item level, and tended to be even more accurate than controls when making global judgements.